The United States remains a country of tenacious faith, including in the sanctity of guns.
Category: Gun Deaths USA
At least 60 votes are still needed to usher any legislation through the Senate and avoid a “filibuster”, which allows lawmakers to stall or prevent a vote on bills. Even apart from the NRA’s clout, a major challenge is that the gun control movement is subject to what political scientists label an “issue attention cycle”. In short, focus on the issue is fleeting. A calamity like the one in Texas gets considerable press for a while but then fades into the backdrop and is replaced by other headlines. The sustained political will needed to pass gun reform simply doesn’t persist.
For all the horror mass shootings, most gun violence in America occurs through a “slow drip” of casualties. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 45,000 Americans died from gun-related causes in 2020, with about 43% being homicides.
Source: Guns in the US: Why the NRA is so Successful at preventing Reform
This overall picture suggests that a marketing change fueled an increased demand for more lethal weapons. This, in turn, appears to have fostered a change in gun culture, which has shifted away from an appreciation of the use of guns for hunting, sport and recreation and toward a view that guns are a necessity to protect oneself from criminals.
Source: 6 Charts show key role Firearms Corporations play in America’s Gun Culture
The ‘mortality penalty’ that the US pays every year is equivalent to the number of Americans who died of Covid in 2020
Source: Why do Americans die earlier than Europeans? | Samuel Preston and Yana Vierboom | The Guardian
America is struggling through a season of death. At least 540,000 people have succumbed to COVID-19, and we have suffered two mass shootings in seven days. Last Tuesday, in a possible or likely hate crime, a white man, shot and killed eight people in the Atlanta area, six of them women of East Asian descent. On Monday, another 21-year-old man, reportedly a Syrian immigrant who had lived most of his life in the United States allegedly shot and killed at least 10 people at a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colorado. One of the victims was a Boulder police officer. Those were not the only examples of large-scale gun carnage in America during that same seven-day period: There were also mass shootings in Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Stockton, California, and Gresham, Oregon.
Two mass shootings within a week: America’s gruesome “bingo card” total keeps growing | Salon.com
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Revised The United States continues to be peculiar in handing out …
Source: 8,124 Murders by Firearm in US vs. 29 (144 equiv.) in UK | Informed Comment
Another mass shooting in the US, and the gun control debate remains bogged down by posturing and distractions.
Source: San Bernardino: Why the US cannot stop the slaughter
The number of gun deaths so far in 2015 is much larger than the number of terrorism deaths in the US between 1970 and 2014, figures from the Global Terrorism Database and the Gun Violence Archive suggest.
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